Archive for October, 2005

A month ago, I changed the CSS code for the online version of my diploma thesis, introducing separate style definitions for printing. Yesterday, I also wrote a style sheet for the rest of my website – excluding home page and blog, on which I will work later. Printing should be even more fun now. Making the changes was pretty easy, since I could use most of the template that I made for the diploma thesis part of my website.

At this point, we are in the good deed singular stage. What’s up with the plural? Well, after reading about the cash crisis for quake helicopters on BBC, I remembered that I wanted to donate money for the tsunami relief effort last year. Actually, I kind of did not donate last year. Money seems much scarcer for this disaster, and this together with my bad conscience from last year encouraged me to do now what I wanted to do last year. (There are a few donation related links in the article.)

Finally! Today I finished rating all the appropriate tracks in my iTunes library – yay! This means I have rated more than 3600 songs. Whew. I guess have been gnawing myself through my library for a time span of about ten months or so. I did and do not rate classical music, audiobooks, and plays (which would add up to another 500 tracks). As regular readers will already know, I am tending to be a generous rater/reviewer, which gives me 440 five star ratings, 1673 four star ratings, about 200 two star ratings and just 39 single star ratings (those are the songs which I might eventually delete anyway). Now I only have to rate songs when I add them to the library – something that I will only do step by step, since the 40 GB hard disk of my PowerBook doesn’t offer much space anymore.

Frers Productions is proud to present: Perception, Aesthetics and Envelopment a video recording and the outline of my talk at our post-graduate college’s concluding conference. Thanks to Lars Meier for recording it – and of course for co-hosting the session, thanks to the rest of the grandiose organization team of the conference and thanks of course to the other participants of the Larses’ panel Urban Spaces and Private Quarters for a good and constructive discussion.

I was made aware of a two people who developed similar ideas to the concept of envelopment: Georg Simmel (could have thought of that myself, since I read and even lectured about the relevant essay on Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben several times. The other hint was on the term personal bubbles which seems to be used quite frequently in the anglo-american world – I am still looking for more info on this term, but it seems that it carries some different connotations. Furthermore, I don’t think of the envelope as something that can burst or pop like a bubble. It is more like a field or sphere or a ball of cotton. Nonetheless, good to know about it. Another idea came back to me later: Richard Sennett, of course, has also talked about a sphere of comfort that is produced in city of today in the book that still has the most pivotal influence on my current work: Flesh and Stone.

Back to the title: I have embedded the video into the new page using valid XHTML code without any fiddling & CSS tricksing. That means that the embedded video won’t be displayed in all browsers though. I would be very happy to hear about the cases where it does / doesn’t work – please write a comment (if you have been a lurker until today: you can write a comment by clicking on the ‘x notes’ link below) and tell me about it. In case the embedded stuff does not work, one can just download the .mp4 file and then play it. I would like to hear about the minimum requirements for playing this, too (for example, I have no idea what version of Windows Media Player is required for playing this file).

The conference was quite a success. Nice people, interesting talks, no major disasters. I did not leave Darmstadt immediately to have opportunities for socializing and joining the one-year Diskothek anniversary party in the 603qm which was quite a bit of fun. On sunday I took the night train to Copenhagen, where I … became ill for a few days when the post-stress relaxation set in (probably enhanced by the less than ideal sleeping conditions in the sleeping coach and potentially infected co-sleepers in same coach). However, a few bins filled with handkerchiefs, visits to the local sauna and hearty meals later, I recovered. And now I am back in Berlin. I did some work after the conference though, as you will see in the next entry to this blog.

I was happy to be back in Darmstadt again, after a prolonged abscence over the summer. And I was again amazed about this city. There must be a fest or some similarly public place occupying activity at least every second weekend. They never stop. The Südhesse ist a festive person. A good thing. Even though I am not sure if I like the Nierenspießchen.